Boy, that screenplay left me with more questions than ANNIHILATION. Although, one lingering issue there - why does Lena Kane refer to her husband only as Kane, even in private? Seems very strange. Which leads me to my first question on PONYO...
Why does Sosuke call his parents by their first names? Was this supposed to be a trick, or tell us something about their relationship? They seem kinda childish in their own right, and there's the seeds of an interesting conflict in Lisa's tantrum over her absent husband, but it never goes anywhere.
Why does Fujimoto want to destroy humans, and is he still planning that? He doesn't need a backstory, but he doesn't even learn to like humans in the end. He's just suddenly nice. And we're not going to address that Ponyo's mother abandoned her to be imprisoned, yet they're all fine in the end? Are they going to go through this crisis 175 more times as all her sisters grow up? Why is Ponyo's real name Brunhilde, and never brought up again? Her father should be calling her that the whole movie! Just a throwaway opera reference?
What's with the ship graveyard? It's a cool visual, but did Sosuke's father just turn around and head the other way? Because they said they were lost. Why bother setting up Koichi at sea if the tsunami was harmless and he just sails safely home? Shouldn't Ponyo or Fujimoto have had to use their magic to help Sosuke rescue him, after the "trial of love"? The engine magically going out and being restored in a single scene doesn't really count. And why is Ponyo falling asleep? Is that a ticking clock a la Cinderella or did Fujimoto put a spell on her (a la Sleeping Beauty)? He has a line of dialogue that kind of hints the latter, but why is it so ambiguous? I don't know how to respond emotionally when I'm this confused.
Why is the moon falling?
And how flat is that climax? "Do you love her as a fish"? They fell in love and loudly proclaimed their love at the very beginning, when she was a fish! There's no development there at all. There's not even a conflict by that point - every single character wants Ponyo and Sosuke to reach the senior center and be in love. The scene where Mad Granny catches the kids as they run from Fujimoto makes no sense, it is a moment of completely forged emotion. She was wrong - the other old ladies weren't being tricked. (also, TWILIGHT ZONE reference).
All of these reek of the same core problem, that the movie sets up conflicts and simply erases them at the end, like it would have been too mean to let anything come to a head. It's a bit ironic - Miyazaki movies are known as incredibly forgiving, yet Ponyo skips right to the forgetting, leaving an almost sinister aftertaste. Did they live happily ever after, or did Koichi die at sea, Lisa become an angry shrew who envies Ponyo's beauty and beats her at night, and the kids fall out of love by middle school, ultimately to be drowned out of existence when Fujimoto collected another few gallons of Ooze? This goes hand in hand with the overabundance of cutesy crap. It's a kids' movie, I can't criticize that too much, but I was cringing pretty hard through some of the ogling preciousness, like either of the scenes with soup. The characters are perfectly lovable without that stuff - the moment they bonk heads waking up is the perfect medium.
All that said, I did like the movie, and it was certainly never boring. The character designs are great (I loved everything with Fujimoto riding his sub), the sea adventure through the Devonian era is exciting for all 10 minutes that it lasts, the action is inventive, and the soft colored pencil backgrounds are sleepily comforting. And I'll take a story that makes no sense via omission over one that makes no sense via overcrowding, as is the case with HOWL'S MC.
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